We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
When love pushes you to fuck up your life and/or someone else’s, it’s your choice to either fight to stay in control or say, well, love is all you want, so whatever happens must be worthwhile:
I promised my wife I’d stop messing around, and I meant it, but last month I did it again and restarted an old fling. I love my wife and the last thing I want is to lose her and the kids’ respect; I’ve got a wonderful family, and I’m not some macho guy who goes cruising to pick up skanks in bars. My problem is that women have always been very attracted to me, I don’t know why, and the sex is very, very satisfying (for both of us), even when we don’t really have much of a relationship. I’m an asshole, and I can’t stop myself. What can I do?
How long does passion last before Mr. Reality enters in?
“Many people don’t realize that over geological time, we’re really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) – 280 (parts per million - ppm) – that’s unheard of. Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it’s been quite higher than that.”
Warren, a highly respected lawyer and Harvard University professor, submitted financial disclosure reports with Congress from 2008-10 for her role at the TARP oversight panel.
She was paid more than $347,000 annually for her work at Harvard, plus another $53,428 in royalties, according to a disclosure report filed in May 2009. Warned earned more than $116,000 as a legal consultant, and other $25,000 doing research for the Consumers Union, a non-profit group in Yonkers, N.Y.
Lefties, always greedy parasites, never producing anything useful or beautiful
Most pols are sociopathic, to varying degrees. Everybody knows that. And everybody knows to ignore their lack of integrity if they like what they are doing.
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer In death's dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer --
Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this In death's other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is Life is For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
Wood stove heat, two bedrooms, and lights and a hot shower when they turn the generator on at 5 am. They serve a heck of hearty breakfast - lots of bacon, meat, eggs, pancakes, and home fries - and a tasty, simple supper. They will cook whatever you bring them from the woods. BYOB - and we do. No phone, no cell service.
Our usual hunting cabin at Bosebuck Camps, 13 miles down a rutted dirt logging road with Moosies usually trotting down it, not far from the Quebec border.
Dogs in the lodge, dining room, and on the beds, of course.
The current uproar about the CLASS longterm care portion of ObamaCare is instructive of both how we got into this mess and how difficult it will be to get out of it. For those who watch TVs Falling Skies, where spinal implant harnesses attached to humans by aliens even when removed leave irremovable control over humans, that could also be our fate under ObamaCare. The blogosphere needs to step up its game to avoid or reduce this implantation.
Major blogs are now writing about the meltdown of the ObamaCare CLASS longterm care program, now that some internal memos have been revealed. But, with facts and figures, readily available reporting (including pre-admissions of failure before Congress reported in the New York Times), and my decades experience and certifications in employee benefits, I wrote about the unsustainability of CLASS long before, to be ignored. ( See here, ObamaCare’s CLASS Failure, and here, The Fraud Admitted.) I saw this before regarding my columns over many years on healthcare issues. Why?
Healthcare and insurance are not sexy issues, and require some deeper understanding to speak about intelligently. Most bloggers are involved in quick-takes on the hot issues of the day. Then, the blogosphere is politicized. Unless that issue can be highlighted quickly to undermine the opposition, and doesn’t require much research, it is passed on. This is even so when the issue is reported in the major media. Bloggers also know that very few of their readers are willing to spend much time on the fine details of most issues.
It wasn’t until ObamaCare that most bloggers began to write about healthcare. Suddenly everyone wrote as an instant expert. And, as often as not, superficially or confusing important facts.
Focus was on ObamaCare’s costs, on government controls over individual choices, and on the mandate, all important. However, the details of ObamaCare make readers' eyes gloss over. The Obama administration counted on that to pass the bill and since to keep the details muted. Of course, some specialized blogs went deeper, but are rarely read.
The CLASS portion of ObamaCare was known to be unsustainable from the get-go, which is why the bill itself required it to be examined after passage before implementation. But, the estimated $75-billion revenues from its early years’ was key to falsely claiming that ObamaCare would not increase federal deficits, before CLASS itself went into huge deficits.
There are many more examples I could easily point out. Assuming that after the 2012 elections there’ll be a Republican president and Congress, despite pledges to repeal ObamaCare, we’ll find much of it welded into our spines. The mandate issue is focused upon because it raises libertarian hackles and because it seems the only promising course in the courts. However, even judicially excising mandates may not uproot Obamacare, if found severable despite the ObamaCare bill not including a severability clause. Also, by then, if there is a then at the Supreme Court, many portions of ObamaCare will be so far along, and many aspects of current healthcare so changed, as to be irremovable. Welcome to Falling Skies, the ObamaCare version. Falling Skies next season is next Summer, just in time for the 2012 election season. Will we survive the aliens? Will we survive ObamaCare? Can we reverse the alien harnesses? Will the blogosphere get ahead of instead of behind the ObamaCare issues? Stay tuned.
The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government. For most of our nation’s history, education was considered preeminent among those reserved powers, and for good reason. Teaching and learning are quintessentially local activities—the thought never would have occurred to our founders that a bureaucrat in Washington is more capable than parents or teachers of creating an educational plan appropriate for an individual child.
That building is not a style I'd go out of my way to build or anything, but it's based on one of the coolest things in the history of the US: The Columbian Exposition in Chicago (aka the Chicago World's Fair) on the 400th anniversary of Cristobal Colon showing up. (he was Portuguese, you know; a man holding a knife to my chin told me that and I believed him, con gusto).
Victoria didn't die until 1901, and Britain didn't get the memo until 1940 or so, but the Columbian Exposition was the exact spot on the calendar that the United States became the most important thing in the world. And the pavilions were like a big contest to see who had the biggest architectural stones. All the heavyweights were there. Sullivan (Wright's boss) McKim, Olmstead, every damn person that matters worked there. Walt Disney's father worked there, and that's where Walt got the idea for Disneyland. The world's first ferris wheel! My old, dead neighbor in Mattapoisett, Frank Millet painted murals there. Mark Twain was the best man at his wedding. Pabst Blue Ribbon was introduced there! Tesla! Scott Joplin!
All the swells sent their artsy-fartsy children to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paree, and they studied classical Roman and Greek stuff. The Columbian Exposition was an explosion of American Beaux-Arts/ Neoclassical architecture on the world. The idiot "Elvis's House" two-story columns on the big shack you took a picture of in Newport was born when they put up a replica of Mount Vernon at the exhibition and everyone got the idea from the back portico on George's house. Didn't matter it doesn't have anything much to do with classical Greek and Roman design. There was a lot of pastiche born out of the style.
That's what that house is. Neoclassical. It was really popular right up to the depression, when everyone got gloomy and started building things like Fenway Park.
Here's a pic of Machinery Hall at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The grand buildings were all temporary structures in a temporary Olmsted landscape, and became an inspiration for things like Disneyland:
,,,the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
Abraham Lincoln was not normally a very self-revealing sort, especially on the subject of religion. But now, in what remains the most socially revolutionary document written by any American president, Lincoln threw aside his self-imposed restraint and proceeded to justify his proclamation and the freedom it bestowed on 3.9 million black slaves in terms of a private covenant he had made with God.
Mark Safranski is elaborating at his defense issues blog Zenpundit on the problems raised by R2P, Right To Protect, or what I termed “Transnational Elites Uber Alles,” for intervention on humanitarian grounds against those nation’s rulers who our liberal elites dislike.
…it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will….Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe for democracy” or for their own supremacy?
Regimes who are not in disfavor with our liberal elites, however oppressive, get off more lightly.
In the first part of a five-part series, R2P is the New COIN, Safranski says:
…like the rise of pop-centric COIN, it will be an electrifying idea that has the potential fire the imagination of foreign policy intellectuals, make careers for its bureaucratic enthusiasts and act as a substitute for the absence of a coherent American grand strategy.
Neither COIN nor R2P are strategies. Unlike COIN, however, which is a set of tactics that may be applicable in some circumstances in pursuit of strategic goals (even if those goals may be arguable), R2P doesn’t have any operational tactics. R2P is more a clarion call to action, including actions that are contrary to US laws or popular will, in pursuit of internationalist goals for global governing as defined by transnational elites.
Further, R2P is cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric that allows liberal elites to preen, displaying their caring feathers, regardless of their ignorance of the military, regardless of the cost-benefit to US national security, and regardless that it isn’t their children being sent into harm’s way.
Lastly, R2P is reactive, not prescriptive of avoiding future threats to US security as a strategy must be. Much the same coterie who want to raise R2P to dominance over US foreign and military policies are largely dismissive of severely hobbling US allies or hollowing our military.
The second part of Safranski’s series is R2P is the New COIN: Slaughter’s Premises, Anne-Marie Slaughter being a prominent intellectual proponent of R2P. Slaughter defines a state as legitimate, effectively governed, only if it provides social goods to its populace, regardless of other sources of cohesion or democratic means of choosing leaders. Illegitimate states are targets for R2P, US core security interests aside.
Safranski writes me that Part 3 will focus on Authority and International Law, R2P resting upon amorphous, internationalist rule proposed to override US laws, Part 4 on Sovereignty, discussing the radicalness of R2P proponents’ program to replace nation states’ independence, and Part 5 on Legitimacy, Networks and Power, discussing the undemocratic, oligarchic views of the R2P proponents.
I suggest you read all five parts if you want to be up on the intellectual fad trotted forward to undermine US sovereignty and core security interests.
A post from our friend Rick, who will be a regular author here at Maggie's once we negotiate the compensation details (he won't take paper money):
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws" — Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
Many of us want to get rich. Some of us, anyway. What’s the fastest way to do it? Print your own money.
If it were only that easy. But what if it were? Ignoring counterfeiters, there have been several cases where privately printed money has fueled growth and provided value. Up to a point, that is, because as we all know, if it were that easy, everybody would do it. Yet the government does it because the government wants everyone to be rich, or the government wants to support declining prices, or the government wants to pay back money it borrowed. So the government creates money and backs it up with full faith and confidence and this should be enough for everyone to be rich and happy.
Why hasn't this goal ever been achieved? Let's take a look at one example where this theory was put to work.
In August 1717, somebody had a bright idea. The idea was based on the concept that the New World offered so much resource wealth and opportunity that anyone with a monopoly could sell portions of that untapped wealth to others, reduce his risk, and make himself and investors rich via joint stock ownership. Stock ownership was not a new idea, but this offer carried tremendous upside, particularly because the company offering the stock was owned and backed by a bank, and the company had been granted a government monopoly on all trade in the region.
John Law was the proprietor of the Banque Générale Privée (General Private Bank), which he funded by investing heavily in the debt of the French government. He literally invented paper money because he viewed money only as a medium of exchange, not a store of value or unit of account. It represented a claim on some value already in existence, and therefore could not have an impact on prices or overall valuations. He was brilliant and everyone, including himself, knew it. Law was so smart he was able to win card games by mentally calculating the odds. He also developed economic theories which are still the basis of some modern economic theory. One of his most persistent creations was the establishment of a central bank, which would oversee and manage the issuance of credit and paper money. Based on his theories, paper money had no relationship to the price of goods and services.
Yesterday's American architecture quiz was was too hard. I honestly had no idea how to categorize it. It was a highly pleasing pastiche, and thus an unfair question. Our expert tells us this:
That one was a bit of a mishmash, I imagine. Been changed a lot over the years. If I was a betting man, I'd say it was Italianate. Squarish, with a clerestory most call a cupola. The second story porch is officially called a "gallery," and I don't think it's original. I think the bottom floor bracketed porch is the original, and they maybe built the other one on top of its roof and added a door. That sort of arrangement is popular in places like Louisiana but not the Northeast much. I imagine the eaves of the main house had modillions or brackets like you see on the bottom floor's porch and they were removed. It may be the whole thing was much older and the Italianate style was overlaid on it. That was popular in the mid 1800s. I think the Adam style fanlight front door and flanking windows are more recent additions, too.
I like to take architectural pics when I go places. As Sipp says, people who make things are demigods, changing the world. Swords, guns, tables, plows, iPhones, or homes. This elegant and not ostentatious manse in Newport was built, no doubt, by a genius evil Capitalist as a summer cottage for his family and friends while he worked in NYC, and is more straightforward than the last one. (All substantial summer homes in Newport - and the seaside in New England in general - are called "summer cottages," as opposed to town houses.)
What Comes After 'Europe'? The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued.
...there’s one last thing that nice people don’t know. It is that hucksters aren’t confined by the same boundaries they assume everyone else is contained by. They are capable not only of sucker-punching you, but of exceeding limits you never thought could be transgressed. Grifters are in some sense not part of the same civilization that Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan inhabit. Maybe they don’t believe this yet. But they will. They will.
Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
Annual family income: $21,700 Money the family spent: $38,200 New debt on the credit card: $16,500 Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710 Budget cuts: $385
At the request of the Ohio Department of Insurance, benefit consultants Milliman, Inc. prepared an estimate of the impact on coverage and rates of ObamaCare when major provisions take effect in 2014.
660,000 are forecast to lose their group coverage from employers. A 735,000 increase in individual coverage is forecast. The percentage of all covered with some type of government coverage is forecast to increase to 31% from 20% in 2010.
Although the percentage of residents with coverage could rise by about 7.9%, the price of individual health insurance coverage might rise about 55% to 85%, excluding the impact of medical inflation, the Milliman consultants predict.
“This is primarily driven by the estimated health status of the new individual health insurance market and the expansion of covered benefits,” the consultants say.
The new tax credits are supposed to help individuals earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level pay for coverage, but U.S. residents with incomes over 400% of the federal poverty level who are in the individual market would have to pay for the coverage out of their own pockets.
Then add in the additional taxes within and caused by ObamaCare. High price to pay, huh. Hope there's any Change left in pockets.
H/T: Hot Air: "the Senate Budget GOP today releases this video to unmask a budget gimmick popularly employed by Democrats as they call for more spending on investment in “education, innovation, clean energy and infrastructure.”
KC Johnson, history professor at my alma mater, describes the lack of intelligent consideration by the faculty there:
...groupthink has the effect of producing more extreme versions of the common assumption. It stands to reason, therefore, that campuses with unusually one-sided faculties will feature more frequent episodes of extremist assertions. Such certainly seems to be the case at my own institution, Brooklyn College...
Read it all. If there's a terrorist incident on campus, call a faculty member, not the NYPD.
That is excellent advice from someone over 30. Social isolation breeds all sorts of strange and unreasonable habits of mind, while social interaction helps us define ourselves, learn about ourselves, and, especially, to learn what our limits are. Isolation nurtures delusions of grandeur or delusions of inferiority, and prevents acceptance of reality.
I attended a faculty cocktail party last night, and, for some reason, the advice I had received many years ago came into my head as a shy person during boarding school: "When you enter a gathering, make sure you say hello to, or introduce yourself to, a dozen people. Then you can leave if you want to. Never act like a shmoozing politician, but it's your job to let people know that you exist. They might want to know you, or they might not. Either way, it's learning. Learning sometimes hurts."
At my age, with genteel breeding and with my life experience, it's a little silly for me to still need that reminder. People tend to enjoy and seek my company.
James Pethokoukis explains it. Wealth-creation is not in their lexicon. They view government as the font of The Good. I definitely do not. If government does not protect my liberties and my property, I oppose it.
Government protects itself, grows itself. It is subject to all of the flaws of human nature, but has unique and potentially dangerous powers. It has become a big monopolistic, parasitic industry, but one with guns and cops and jails. Anybody who thinks that big government is altruistic is sorely misguided, delusional, naive, or stoned. Drunk on power and perqs, our public servants dread having to return to real life.
Red Cross: Obese Now Outnumber Hungry
Belief in God 
